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Craigslist Fires Back Over Adult Services Accusations
Craigslist has fired back at South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster in an open letter defending the company's policies and procedures surrounding the much debated "adult services." Stating not only the measures that have been taken to minimize illegal behavior, CEO Jim Buckmaster suggests that Craigslist is doing much better at minimizing questionable ads than other major competitors like Yahoo!, Google, and others. "Mr McMaster, I strongly recommend you reconsider and retract your remarks, and positively affirm that you have no intention of launching criminal investigations aimed at any of these upstanding companies, because in truth none of them are deserving of such treatment. [...] We're willing to accept our share of criticism, but wrongfully accusing craigslist of criminal misconduct is simply beyond the pale. We would very much appreciate an apology at your very earliest convenience. As I'm sure would all of the other fine companies whose executives you've called out as criminals."
... when they refused to grow a pair and claim First Amendment protection, not to mention the safe-harbor provision of the CDA. Paternalistic, moralizing governors and DAs have no Constitutional basis to object to anything Craigslist was doing, and the company should have told them to STFU and GBTW.
But instead they tried to "negotiate," "compromise," and otherwise find a middle ground with religiously-motivated censors and nanny-statists.
Yeah. That always works. Because those sorts of people always go away and leave you in peace once you give in to their demands. <rolleyes>
If he wrote it down, sue him for libel, too. It's pretty obvious that saying your business is a criminal enterprise that endangers its customers' lives would be damaging to your business, and there seems to be plenty of evidence showing that it is better run than many unmentioned competitors.
But I doubt your state has exhausted its backlog of murders, rapes, armed robberies, child molestation cases, etc. Until you do, here's a polite suggestion: get your fucking priorities straight you worthless politician.
I swear, the fatal flaw of democracy is that it relies on the public to make the highest office holders do their job and not just use the office as a means of personal advancement. At least under a monarchy, the king could bitch slap a guy like this for grandstanding (not saying we should go back to a monarchy).
To me, it sounds like you're advocating reasoning with people that may well be unreasonable. Embarking on that is like arguing with pigs.
I know you're probably saying that as a hyperbole, but sometimes I do kinda wonder.
Way I see it, any working democracy nowadays has the politicians and some non-elected body to fix the politicians' deliberate self-promoting screw-ups. In some countries (e.g., the USA) it's the judges. In some (e.g., the UK) there are some non-elected lords who get to say "that's stupid and unconstitutional, screw that."
Seriously, you'd expect the aristocracy to be the self-serving self-centered barstards, and the politicians to represent the common man. But the way it seems to work entirely too often is that the politicians pull some populist stunt as a law, and then keep their fingers crossed that the non-elected guys have the balls to strike it down. I'm thinking just of the slew of recent "think of the children" laws (saving them even from non-threats like video games) that seem to crop up everywhere before elections.
Except sometimes the non-elected guys don't intervene, or nobody challenges it all the way to the apropriate level to strike it down, and the rest of the country is saddled with the stupidity its politicians wrought. And even in the best case scenario, often it can take several years before its escalated to the point where it can be removed.
Now I'm not entirely deluded. I know how totalitarian regimes historically were worse, and why some people shed blood to get, say, the Magna Carta signed by the king.
But I still wonder. It seems to me like at the very least for each two evils we avoided via democracy, we introduce a new one _because_ of the way modern democracies work.
I'm not sure what a better system would look like, but sometimes I wish someone would invent it already.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Spoken like a true member of the majority, who doesn't know what its like to be surrounded by people who will discriminate againt you at any chance.
I'm a non-christian living where there's a church on virtually every block. Don't talk to me about 'religion' and 'minority rule'
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Interesting. Last night Jim Buckmaster was talking on NPR about the case, and complaining that everything in the Internet, and particularly Craigslist, is held at a much higher standard than, for example, the car industry. If cars kill 45000 people a year, why are car makers allowed to make cars that can two twice as fast as the speed limit? Asking CL to go so far beyond their duty is, to say the least, unfair.
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